Written by Smatterdoodle
Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore a lot of video game music. I am an avid player of Final Fantasy 14 (which if you don’t know, their music is famously amazing), hell, I sang the title song from the first Kingdom Hearts at church when I was a kid. “So, Smatterdoodle,” I hear you inquire, “Why on Naoki Yoshida’s green earth would I deprive myself of the stunning artistry of video game music as a whole by instantly muting games that so many seasoned professionals toiled for long days and months to bring to my grubby, ungrateful gamer paws?” So glad you asked.
Firstly, I don’t trust game devs to give me their best most of the time. The games industry is absolutely awful to the talent and I’m convinced that the lauded triple-A studio is where passion goes to die. The first time I boot up a game is SUCH a gamble. Do I trust an exhausted, caffeine-overloaded, crunch time dev to audio balance between their title page, cutscenes, and the actual gameplay audio? No I do not. And yet, hopeful as I am, I do NOT start a game with my PC audio muted in its entirety, as I most likely should. I don’t wear headphones at all either, aside from being polite for quiet hours. My ears are simply too sensitive to wear any kind of headphones. These video games insist on having the very first noises be unskippable 20 million THX decibel cutscenes that don’t go to the cutscene folder later and I have to either anticipate having to rip headphones off my head. Or worse, panic mute so I don’t get Team Rocket blasted into space by the force of 7 Days To Die’ opening menu after a new update. Please, developers, don’t have the default volume, which I cannot change until I open the game and get to the settings menu, set to 100%. Like, 50% tops by default, and have captions for the intro cutscene. I expect some thought into audio balancing so I don’t personally have to turn my computer and speaker volume down from the 10% I keep it at perpetually.
Secondly, lots of the types of games I like to play seem to have a penchant for having only one short and frankly jarring song playing the whole time. I prefer easy and fun builders or what I call “fidget” games (games that require little thought and are almost purely a means of moving my fingers a bit, autistically) and I’d rather be in dead silence than listen to loop 2234355 of the Minecraft creative mode music yet again. I MUCH prefer to mute Capybara Spa and listen to my favorite pirated unlisted goth club dj playlist. (I’ll see if I can find it again so you can ALSO listen to 2010-era club tunes instead of Tiny Terraces and its pretty loud default automated plant guy harvesting beeps and boops.) Oh also, I play a lot of phone games!! Idle Slayer, Loop Hero, Card Crawl, Guncho, anything by Kairosoft has AMAZING music, but I shan’t be blasting it in public and I’m not gonna have that AND a podcast going in my earbuds on the bus to wherever-the-fuck. Thankfully, MOST of them have separated music and various SFX volume bars in the settings, and I avail myself of those immediately upon downloading a game for the first time.
ALSO DID YOU KNOW that a lot of games have audio-only cues for core gameplay and/or plot? You may think that this would be an argument AGAINST muting games but NO!!!! It is in fact an accessibility issue! If developers would provide alternative signals for games like Five Nights At Freddy’s then Deaf people and Hard of Hearing people (like myself, and YOU if you have audio processing disorder!) would have an easier time playing their games! FNAF 1 is technically playable with no sound, with a harder difficulty than standard play, but FNAF 2 and 3 are impossible to complete without sound cues as they have insufficient accessibility features for Deaf and Hard of Hearing folk. Your customers shouldn’t have to download basic accessibility mods in the year of our lord 2026. Who doesn’t love more customers for your digital product? Check GitHub or Deaf gamer communities for tools YOU can add to make your game something I can beat while muting without missing a hidden item for 4 hours. Fortnight, of all things, has Deaf and Hard of Hearing settings as of 2024. Minecraft has had fully integrated, directional, live text alerts for every sound they have in the game for over 8 years now!!! Get it together.
But honestly? My most pressing issue is that I like streaming my games to my friends on Discord. There is no hell quite like trying to balance audio for the fourteenth time because discord has decided to mute half of my speaking but bounces Terraria and my chair squeaks from speaker to mic over and over. And it can’t even hear my cat meowing right into the microphone. I’ve tried push-to-talk, but some games are simply too fast-paced to pause to chat in the middle, and as a modded game enjoyer, there are fewer stars in the heavens than keys on my keyboard that already overlap with like 4 things in the Minecraft packs I play. “But Smatterdoodle, video game music is an unmissable part of the vibes of a video game!” I love my friends on discord more than even the best boss battle music. Yes, I’ll sacrifice hearing Freshly Glazed Porxie from Final Fantasy 14 or Rage Beneath the Mountains from Genshin Impact, even if audio cues are a fun way to get ahead of attacks in the fight. If I die, I die. To be totally fair to Video Game Music at large, discord fixing its shit would fix a great deal of my suffering with regards to my issues with game sound. It makes sense to have the platform I am streaming out of to automatically filter the noise coming out of my game such that it will never interfere with my microphone audio. Some sound wizards get on this, please. I will switch back to Teamspeak or Mumble if need be. Anything!!
So yeah! Don’t have loud music on by default for the start menu, make sure to look up and adhere to basic accessibility features, and somebody at discord please comply with my demands!!! I shan’t turn to headphones for this issue ever! You can’t make me!!!
POSTSCRIPT: A wonderful friend of mine has suggested that I may have simply given up on headphones made a decade or more ago and I should give it another go. If the new ones work for me, I will update this with their maniacal cackling and I-told-you-so.
POST-POSTSCRIPT: yes it was the fault of my crappy headphones. Turns out I hate heavy ones with a tight grip on the skull, so now I have Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones (thanks to secondhand ebay prices, I even have new replaceable ear and head pads), which is a STARK upgrade from my Kraken pink cat ones. MY OTHER POINTS STILL STAND. HARRUMPH.
Abilitypoints’ Fortnite Accessibility Review via Can I Play That?
https://caniplaythat.com/2022/04/26/fortnite-accessibility-review-can-i-play-that/
Cyborg Kabir on Youtube
https://youtu.be/ylk4174LS3k?si=eTKfNCqH8uj4M0Gd
Recommended playlist for anything, via two more-than-decade-old goth DJ spotify playlist. I miss being close to The Church and I miss when it was at The Lizard Lounge.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2YzVEv9Y0C9baLLrazZUFO?si=8xn7OA1dQH-vHeZfNOMRYA&pi=wV8Ho0zzSUOAg
Also featuring above, All-Time Favorite hits, once released as a CD I swear I will find one day.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/19MYoVMZMK8kCVOrbBYOMR?si=Hi8mlMAbTYuQkj1FVtFtPA&pi=7sahGS0DSnqIh
Don’t get a subscription to Spotify just to listen to banger music. Have your friendly local music dude rip all these onto a flash drive for you. It’s good for the soul to listen to old stolen crap.
Developer guide for making your media more accessible!
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022172/No-More-Excuses-Your-Guide